Invaluable teachable moments through Management Practice

An integral part of Goizueta’s curriculum, Management Practice (MP) offers invaluable real-world experience to students. The course provides interactions with industry leaders in meaningful exercises of lessons taught in the classroom. Exemplifying connections powered by the Goizueta network, Goizueta alums often serve as clients and bring real issues faced in the current marketplace.

Student teams work throughout the semester to identify and analyze the problem and develop solutions. The capstone of each semester brings students face to face with the clients for a final pitch of their solutions.

Evening MBA students recently completed their second semester of MP. Three finalist teams presented their projects to the clients, Claudia Gibbs Howard 09EvMBA and Tracey Barash 93FTMBA. The client company was Turner Broadcasting’s Adult Swim, which airs on the same channel as Cartoon Network. For their final presentations, students focused on key demographics, changing markets, cost, implementation, a timeline for results, and other factors.

“Management Practice is an excellent combination of everything we’ve learned so far. This semester we received some data and were asked to use the knowledge we’ve acquired thus far in the program. Our team relied on some of the marketing frameworks we learned to develop what we considered the best approach to solving the problem,” said Kelly McCormick 15EvMBA, who presented as a member of one of the finalist teams.

For the Evening MBA Program, Management Practice is implemented in each of the first three semesters and builds on the curriculum taught in the classroom. Teams are reassigned each semester to help students learn how to collaborate effectively with a diverse group of individuals who essentially don’t report to them.

“Our Evening MBA students are working professionals. They know firsthand the type of challenges faced when addressing real-world problems. Our goal is not only to prepare students for post-graduation but to help them achieve next day effectiveness,” says Harold Lewis, associate dean of the Evening MBA Program.

“Management Practice helps them to practice taking on those types of challenges and figure out how to be a team, define the problem, gather the evidence and data, sort through it, carve out some insight and recommendations and then be able to persuade the decision maker that this is what they should do.”

Finals presentations conclude with time for the clients to deliberate, provide feedback to the presenting groups and announce the winning team.